Book Information: Seven Ages

The fierce, austerely beautiful, and visionary voice that has become Glück's trademark speaks in these poems of a life lived in unflinching awareness. Many of the poems in this collection bear the familiar features of Glück's earlier work, returning to themes of nature and the classical narratives that explain the phenomena of the world around us.

Unlike her past work, many of these poems inhabit the realm of dreams, moving backward in time to an eidetic, unrecoverable past and ahead to an as-yet unrealized future. "Earth was given to me in a dream/ In a dream I possessed it." In these poems, Glück is wry, dreamlike, idiomatic, undeceived, unrelenting.

This new transparent mode, although charged by the indelible imagery and exact phrasing her readers will recognize, represents an ecstatic departure from her previous work.
Contents: